Using video to encourage good eating habits

While it’s important to encourage good eating habits, it’s not a practice everyone takes part in. Fortunately, the ubiquity of online video may provide a solution to educating people on the benefits of nutrition and how to practice healthy eating. Not only is video a good medium for communicating complex information about nutrition, but it is also a great way to illustrate the practical side of nutrition.

When using video as a way to learn about nutrition, it is wise to learn about it in conjunction with fitness. As the two concepts are highly interrelated, many video makers focus on the benefits of a healthy lifestyle which includes both good nutrition and healthy fitness habits. By searching on large video streaming websites such as YouTube, it is possible to find many channels that focus on nutrition, fitness, or both.

The first benefit associated with nutrition videos is the educational aspect that makes the science of nutrition easier to understand for everybody. These are incredibly valuable as, even if you only have a surface level understanding of nutrition concepts, you still have enough knowledge to fundamentally change your eating habits in order to achieve a healthier lifestyle.

Nutrition education is often delivered by individuals who have academically studied the subject of nutrition or by those who have had years of experience in the field of nutrition. As many individuals have these qualifications, the education they provide on the subject of nutrition is often reliable and of high quality.

As the fields of nutrition and fitness are highly integrated, nutrition videos can be an excellent place to start in defining your fitness goals. As nutrition is a critical factor in the fitness goals you are striving for, your diet will be substantially different depending on your fitness goals.

For example, the macronutrient composition of a bodybuilder’s diet ideally consists of approximately 40% to 60% carbohydrates, 15%-25% fats, and 25% to 35% proteins. Such a diet allows bodybuilders to consume more energy in order to rebuild muscle during their downtime while converting little of that energy to fat.

An individual who is interested in something along the lines of cross training or marathon running however, would have a significantly different dietary composition. Since these individuals are more concerned with keeping their body fat low over building muscle, their macronutrient composition should only contain 10%-30% carbohydrates. With a much lower carbohydrate intake, the individual concerned with fat loss should increase their fat and protein intake to 30% to 40% and 40% to 50% respectively.

Other variations in diet exist depending on one’s fitness goals, however it is crucial that your diet is integrated and highly compatible with your fitness goals. Video provides an excellent starting point to establish your diet.

While such videos are popular in the domain of fitness, nutrition videos can provide useful information on many other aspects of a healthy lifestyle. Though often overlooked, one’s diet has major implications in quality of sleep, energy throughout the day, cardiovascular health, and many other factors which contribute to a healthier quality of life. By making use of all of the available online resources pertaining to diet, it is possible to holistically improve your quality of life.

While dietary videos pertaining to fitness are often highly tailored to one’s specific fitness goals, there are a plethora of fitness tips and advice that can be given to individuals of all body types regardless of their fitness goals. Video provides a great way to educate upon these matters while providing many practical solutions to dietary challenges.

For example, many videos discuss the importance of spacing your calorie intake throughout the day. Many individuals who lead busy lives find this challenging as they are unable to eat at several separate times. As a result, it is often the case that such busy individuals tend to eat all of their calories in one or two sittings, which has negative implications on their diet.

Luckily, there are many videos which discuss not only the importance of this habit of spacing out your meals, but a variety of solutions and step-by-step walk throughs such as pre-cooking and storing meals for a series of days, quick meals that take less than 5 minutes to prepare, or even offering consumer recommendations as to which “to-go” products are the optimal choice.

Another example of non-fitness dietary advice are the implications that diet has on your sleep. Every night when you sleep, your body enters a sleep cycle that fluctuates between deep and light stages of sleep. During the deep stages of sleep (stages 3 and 4), the body releases a series of hormones which affect many lifestyle factors.

For example, during stages 3 and 4 of the sleep cycle, the body releases high levels of growth hormone which contributes to the rebuilding of micro tears in muscle tissue and encourages muscle development. Additionally, during these deep stages of sleep, the body regulates levels of two hormones called gherkin and leptin – hormones which control your feelings of hunger. If these hormone levels are out of equilibrium, then your hunger patterns throughout the day will be sporadic. In this way, diet and sleep are highly interrelated.

There are a series of best practices you can take in order to ensure your diet is highly conducive towards good sleep quality. For example, timing your meals so that you do not overeat before bed ensures a higher quality of sleep. The reason for this is that your body requires energy to digest food. If you are expending energy in digesting food while you sleep, you are not allowing your body to recover at its full potential. Further, you experience greater discomfort in trying to digest food while you sleep. When these factors are considered together, eating large quantities of food right before bed results in poorer sleep quality.

Additionally, if your goal is fat loss, it is best to refrain from high carbohydrate intake several hours before bed. As unused carbohydrates are quickly converted to fat through a process called lipogenesis, consuming high quantities of carbohydrates before bed results in little of your calorie intake being used for energy and a high portion being stored as body fat.

By using video to learn about nutrition and its integration into your daily life, you can position yourself to be eating in a way that supports a healthy lifestyle.